carrier-scale wi-fi

Helping Great Names Provide Great Service

In a few short years, Wi-Fi has gone from a convenience to a business must. Businesses are managing the massive onboarding of user-owned devices; stadium owners are running up against bandwidth limitations as smartphone-wielding fans download apps, view statistics and stream instant replays; and everyday mobile users simply expect dependable service anywhere, anytime.

For years, we’ve been helping a wide range of companies, venue owners and service providers solve exactly these issues. Names like NTT-BP, Microsoft, Heathrow Airport, and United Center arena depend on Aruba to keep service levels high and give users of today’s smart, high-bandwidth devices unparalleled performance while retaining uncompromising policy control.

Carrier-Class Public Wi-Fi

Mobile data and video traffic is exploding, owing to the fast-growing popularity of bandwidth-hungry applications. Smartphones and tablets are great for subscribers, but are creating a real problem in cellular networks.

The resulting congestion is causing increasingly poor performance and frequent service disruptions. Users call to complain about poor video quality or slow downloads. Deploying more and smaller licensed spectrum cells is one solution to the problem, but limited and expensive licensed spectrum and backhaul costs makes this approach cost prohibitive.

Solutions for 3G/4G Offload and Managed Services

A far superior and cost-effective solution involves offloading traffic to Wi-Fi and integrating it as part of the carrier’s access network to create a seamless end user experience. Integrating Wi-Fi provides operators more visibility and control while delivering hassle-free, secure and high-bandwidth services to customers. This allows operators to offer walled garden or premium content services over Wi-Fi, leading to additional monetization opportunities.

Aruba’s carrier-grade Wi-Fi solution provides the high levels of security, RF reliability and performance needed to deliver the best end user experience. Communications between the Wi-Fi infrastructure and Wi-Fi gateways that interface with mobile core elements are secured via GRE or IPsec tunnels.

Our strategic partnerships with leading Wi-Fi gateway vendors and authentication/policy management solutions have enabled the creation of an end-to-end, carrier-grade solution that provides operators with real-time RF network information and application visibility, allowing them to design and deliver secure, intelligent and policy-driven traffic offload.

Aruba has been closely involved with the Wi-Fi Alliance, through the Wi-Fi-certified Passpoint program (based on Hotspot 2.0 specifications), as well as the Wireless Broadband Alliance, through the Next Generation Hotspot (NGH) initiative.

These organizations are working to promote automatic and secure connectivity to Wi-Fi hotspots and make roaming between hotspots as simple as roaming between cellular networks, and Aruba is actively participating in several NGH trials with operators globally.

Wi-Fi for Large Public Venues

With dense, complicated environments and constant browsing, downloading, streaming and uploading of content, large venues like stadiums, arenas, and airports can pose a challenge in terms of effective wireless LAN design.

Aruba WLANs are optimized to deliver the RF performance and reliability required to support the highest densities of wireless clients while enabling the intelligent offloading of traffic from 3G/4G networks. Now fans can enjoy video instant replay, use in-seat food and beverage service applications, and upload photographs or surf the Internet—quickly, smoothly and seamlessly.

Meanwhile, ClearPass Guest lets you enhance public Wi-Fi with customizable branding of captive portals and location and context specific advertising, and allows for further interaction with the fans. And advanced security features provide comprehensive protection against various threats while enforcing differentiated policies for network access based on the user role, device or application.

At Aruba, we want to be your public Wi-Fi partner. Let us help you design, configure, and validate your deployments, applying unmatched network design experience and expertise to ensure a best-in-class network experience.

The Aruba Advantage

Aruba’s scalable, flexible wireless network solutions are being deployed right now by major carriers, venue owners, and managed service providers to deliver superior Wi-Fi and keep service levels consistently high, even in demanding RF environments.

• Specially designed for high performance and centralized manageability, Aruba’s distributed architecture scales without compromising performance, reliability, quality, security or ease of management.

• Choose from a full range of access points (APs), all purpose-built for high-density Wi-Fi client environments.

• Aruba Activate™ enables zero-touch AP provisioning and automates firmware upgrades and inventory management, significantly reducing operational costs.

• Adaptive Radio Management™ (ARM™) technology automatically optimizes Wi-Fi client behavior and ensures that APs stay clear of RF interference.

• Policy Enforcement Firewall™ (PEF™) utilizes contextual information to enforce access privileges and restrictions for each user without requiring any traffic re-engineering.

• Application awareness automatically identifies and prioritizes the most important latency-sensitive traffic, guaranteeing the highest-quality user experience.

• AirWave™ network management offers centralized, end-to-end multivendor control and visibility into the entire wired and wireless infrastructure.

• The ClearPass Guest visitor management system automates the provisioning and management of mobile device network access, allowing guests to self-register for secure access to hotspots and corporate WLANs. It also supports highly customizable captive portal pages with branding and location-specific advertisements.

Managed Wi-Fi and Mobility Services

With companies officially issuing a wide range of mobile devices to employees, and with more employees insisting on using their own mobile devices for work, high-performance and secure Wi-Fi is no longer a convenience — it’s essential. Since many companies don’t possess expertise to manage complex Wi-Fi, they are outsourcing IT services to managed service providers (MSP).

Armed with Aruba technology including core infrastructure, management and network service solutions, MSPs are able to provide a wide range of the capabilities outsourced to them, from providing standard off-the-rack WLAN services for small and medium businesses (SMBs) all the way up to designing and maintaining highly distributed enterprise-level networks.

The components of Aruba’s unified wired and wireless architecture work together seamlessly, enabling MSPs to successfully deliver managed value-added services. Ideal for large campus Wi-Fi installations, Aruba Mobility Controllers centrally manage encryption, policy enforcement, and network services and can scale to support thousands of APs.

Aruba Instant works in distributed Wi-Fi environments by dynamically electing one AP to manage other APs, while Aruba Activate provides zero-touch provisioning, automates configuration and enables cloud-based inventory management.

Adaptive Radio Management (ARM) technology lets Wi-Fi clients associate with the best channel, frequency and AP. The Aruba Policy Enforcement Firewall provides granular access policy enforcement and sophisticated protection against wireless threats, while ClearPass Policy Manager automates the implementation of network access policies for guest, company-supplied and BYOD devices.

The Airwave network management platform provides comprehensive visibility and control over multiple customer networks and extensive RF troubleshooting capabilities.

Together, Aruba’s extensive carrier-grade Wi-Fi solutions empower MSPs to provide managed Wi-Fi services with a remarkably low total cost of ownership—and a superior bottom line.

“ We looked for a cost-effective, enterprise-grade solution that was simple to deploy and manage. Unlike other Wi-Fi vendor solutions we considered, Aruba’s Instant platform provides a full set of features...reducing our deployment time by at least 75%.”

- Rick TangemanPresident and CEO

HarborLink

“ We selected Aruba because it met our security, resilience, scalability and flexibility needs.”

- Kevin FallonCommercial Leader

T5 Systems at BAA (Owner/Operator of Heathrow Airport, London)

“ As host to more than 200 events per year and 40 million guests, we have been relying on Aruba to provide the most reliable, high-capacity Wi-Fi access for multimedia value-added services for over seven years.”

- Steve SchulzeCIO, United Center

©2013 Aruba Networks, Inc. AirWave®, Aruba Networks®, Aruba Mobility Management System®, Bluescanner, For Wireless That Works®, Mobile Edge Architecture®, People Move. Networks Must Follow®, The All-Wireless Workplace Is Now Open For Business, RFprotect®, Green Island, and The Mobile Edge Company® are trademarks of Aruba Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Aruba Networks reserves the right to change, modify, transfer, or otherwise revise this publication and the product specifications without notice. While Aruba uses commercially reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy of the specifications contained in this document, Aruba will assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions. Note: All scaling metrics outlined in this document are maximum supported values. The scale may vary depending upon the deployment scenario and features enabled. CO_ServiceProvider_030713

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www.arubanetworks.com

Contact Us Today

To learn more about how Wi-Fi from Aruba can help you maintain outstanding service levels without compromising security, visit arubanetworks.com/serviceprovider. Or, if you have an immediate need and would like to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by Wi-Fi for your customers, venue or managed services business, set an appointment by emailing info@aruba.com.

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Service providers can now offload cellular traffic locally and selectively centralize managed applications to reduce mobile core bandwidth requirements, while still providing the application visibility.